B-

C+

C

C-

D+

D

D-

F

In the official tie-in comics, Erskine tells Phillips that the formula for the serum exists only in his head. He never wrote it down so that others wouldn't misuse it. That's why nobody's ever managed to successfully duplicate it after Erskine's death.

I agree that it seems odd how the SSR/SHIELD never cracked the Tesseract despite having it for seventy years. Maybe it would have been better if the Tesseract had been found more recently.

No offence to any of the genius guys working for SHIELD, but the Tesseract is beyond human technology, seriously beyond... the Red Skull had some success leaching power from it, but that's about it... and the SHIELD techs managed to leach power from it... at least they got to the level where they understood it was alive lol

The Tesseract is seriously high level technology, in the comics it's called the Cosmic Cube... and even the geniuses in the comics don't fully understand the thing...

in 70 years, learning it is alive and how to leach energy from it without blowing a building up, i'd call that respectful progress given how advanced the Tesseract actually is...

How did the Tesseract end up on Earth anyway? In CA Red Skull says something like it was the "crown jewel of Odin's treasure room" and at the end of The Avengers it seems heavily implied its power is beyond what Humans should have access too and Thor takes it back to Asgard.

What? Did Odin get word of the trouble Loki was going to cause with it, snap his fingers, and say "Oh, damn! The Tesseract! I remember now I left it on Earth a few millennia ago." then he does a dunce-slap to his own head and says, "Man, if my head wasn't screwed on right... Well, it's a good thing it doesn't harness the power to destroy an entire planet or a good chunk of the universe or anything like that."

in 70 years, learning it is alive and how to leach energy from it without blowing a building up, i'd call that respectful progress given how advanced the Tesseract actually is...

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Put, again, Red Skull and his little buddy are able to harness some of its power and make remarkable weaponry out of it using limited 1940s technology during a time of war when rare and valuable materials were hard to come by for the Axis (and by extension I'd assume Hydra.)

and the SHIELD techies managed to take that a few dozen steps further and turn the Hydra style weapons into Weapons of Mass Destruction...

That's like turning a 9mm into an atomic bomb...

In other words, they managed to pull energy from the tesseract magnitudes above anything Hydra had ever achieved... reasonable progress in the time given, assuming half the time was also spent on researching it's use for full clean energy, as Fury suggested...

The Nazis also had a knack for advancing technology... Nearly every current "high tech" technology we have, both militarily as well as civilian, can be directly linked to german advancements of science, engineering, and medical understanding made during WWII. It's a dark reality that most don't like to even think about, let alone acknowledge, that modern society is what it is because of them.

I'd say it would be more accurate to say Germany was in the forefront of a lot of technologies and scientific research before the Nazi's came along. Their imposing ideological purity on universities and research centers as well as everything else led to a flight of brilliant minds from Germany (Einstein being one of the most famed) before the war, and a further plundering of researchers like Von Braun after which made a vast hobbling of the country's research abilities. The Nazi's co-opted many fields and did more to damage German intellectual power than they ever created.

The Nazis weren't exactly ahead in the sciences for the most part. But their procurement methods combined with their growing desperation allowed them to field technologically weapons and equipment faster. The first jet engine was British, the Christie suspension was American, sloped armor Russian etc. Hitler's fascination with wonder weapons gave him the desire to dump a lot of resources into their development, but most of that was not into the basic science, it was aimed at getting a working weapon system into the field.

Other than perhaps rocketry I can't think of one area where the Nazis had a sizable purely technological advantage.

I actually enjoyed the first half of the film the most... Everything in NY felt kind of flat in comparison to the excellent team build up.

My biggest issues:
- The CG aliens. Ugh. All the hand to hand fights looked quite off, like the aliens had no mass at all. Like they were added in post. (Hmm) The biggest offender was the Cap on top of the cop car fighting off two aliens. Yikes.
- Hulk was a bit too well-behaved in the fight - especially near the end, where they stare down Loki.

How did the Tesseract end up on Earth anyway? In CA Red Skull says something like it was the "crown jewel of Odin's treasure room" and at the end of The Avengers it seems heavily implied its power is beyond what Humans should have access too and Thor takes it back to Asgard.

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The building looked ancient enough to have been from the time of the Asgardian wars with the Frost Giants.

The war may have come to Earth, but the FG's just seemed (like Loki later) to want to rule us, having a slave army, rather than anything else, considering Humanity to be far too primitive to care about.

Thor even states in the Avengers Earth is still regarded like that today, Odin presumably used that fact to his advantage and kept the Tesseract safe by putting it into the care of a Norwegian sect that had dealings with the Asgard over the years, a secret society he trusted with things like this.

Knowing that it would be centuries before Earth even overcame enough of it's superstitious fear to even think of removing the cube from their relic-like care for it, and even longer before they had technology to do that "nudge it and make it spit energy" thing it seems to do.

Unfortunately the Nazi occult divisions during the war got there first. And even then all Hydra actually did was develop pritimitive but robust superconductors to take that energy to specialised crystals that could contain and regulate the release of that energy. All of which where shattered or destroyed during the war and by Red Skull's paranoid self destruct switches everywhere.

And if it weren't for the "Hey I'm here" shit the thing did at the end of Captain America it's possible the lower levels of contained energy release might have gone unnoticed by the realms, it being 50+ years for them to bother meaning they seemed to care little anyway.

It was better off hidden on a realm no one would care about, meaning here. Red Skull just put a bit of a dent in those plans.

Which is odd, since Howard Stark recovered the Tesseract you'd think SHIELD, Stark Industries or the US Government would have been able to figure out how it works and duplicate Red Skull's work considering they had 70 years to do it in.

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Especially since they had Zola, the guy who figured it out initially, in custody.

Which is odd, since Howard Stark recovered the Tesseract you'd think SHIELD, Stark Industries or the US Government would have been able to figure out how it works and duplicate Red Skull's work considering they had 70 years to do it in.

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Especially since they had Zola, the guy who figured it out initially, in custody.

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I assumed that his custody didn't last very long, but that's based on where he ends up in the comics, and thus may not be valid.

Zola was smart enough to turn himself into one of the first cyborgs in human history, even though he's just supposed to be a biochemist. Then again, in the comics the reason he was so ahead of his time with genetics was because he found notes and equipment left behind by aliens.

As for the Super-Soldier program, everyone seems to forget that there's two elements to the process: Being injected with the Serum, and then being treated with Vita-Rays. Without the Vita-Ray treatment, the serum remains unstable and has unpredictable effects on the subject (I don't know if Red Skull also got the Vita Rays or not).

No one knew how to duplicate the Vita-Rays (and maybe not even the serum itself), which is why Bruce Banner used Gamma Radiation instead. Except that didn't work as planned either...

I see there's a minor flap about Whedon's joke about being adopted. I thought it was tasteless but not offensive enough to ruin the movie because all superheroes as well as supervillians has peculiar family issues and singling this out is it like objecting to one kernel of corn on an ear.

Worst, I thought it was more objectionable that it was an out of character line, Joss Whedon speaking in his own voice, for a cheap laugh. I know the timing was good, but does anyone really think the character Thor as presented in his movie would have said such a thing? No, Thor as presented in this movie doesn't count because Thor was not characterized in this movie at all. (One of the many reasons I thought Whedon's script/direction was mediocre at best.)

Well, he has had more time to come to terms with everything that's happened since his movie. His movie happened over the course of only a few days at most, so he's had a year or so to deal with everything that happened with Loki.

I didn't take the line as against adopted children. Rather, I took it as Thor distancing himself by not being blood-related to the asshole currently destroying New York. Especially since he defended Loki barely 10 seconds before that line.

funny that Hyperspace is moaning about the Chitauri feeling 'weightless' when they were played by stuntmen in mocap suits as seen in set photos from the filming in NYC...

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I "moan" because that's how it looked. They might well have done on-set mo-cap, but it sure doesn't look like it in most scenes. If they did, they did it poorly. They look like they should weigh close to 300 lbs, but they get thrown around like 50 lb anorectics.

And besides, most on-set photos did NOT feature stuntmen in mo-cap suits. That was what had people wondering for a long time who the villains would be - skrull duplicates of Avengers, or something else.